


Beloved Mother and Wife

by vulcanrise



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Childhood Trauma, Dead Character, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny, Lesbian Dee, Monologue, Parent-Child Relationship, Parental Trauma, Post-Season/Series 12, Sibling Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:38:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcanrise/pseuds/vulcanrise
Summary: March 2017: Dennis Reynolds leaves Philadelphia to be a father.September 20th, 2017: Barbara Reynolds has been dead for exactly ten years.It's time for Dee to pay her respects. Armed with a bottle of wine and decades of trauma, she finally tells her mother everything she wishes she could have said.
Relationships: Dee Reynolds & Dennis Reynolds, Dee reynolds & Barbara reynolds
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27





	Beloved Mother and Wife

**Author's Note:**

> i've been working on this monologue for several months now and i'm so glad it's finally complete. i was watching the s3 episode where barbara dies and was really struck by how little dee reacted to her mother's death, especially given how much trauma she has from her mom. and then in s8, there was again no reaction. i figured it was only a matter of time before it was all let loose, and realized the 10 year anniversary of her death lines up with when dennis was in north dakota.
> 
> heavy trigger warnings:  
\- this deals very intimately with a fucked-up parent/child relationship. i was not completely inspired by my own life, but please proceed with caution if you are in a similar situation.  
\- alcoholism  
\- internalized homophobia  
\- internalized misogyny
> 
> also: i deal with dee's relationship with dennis here. it is purely a sibling bond and anyone coming to this fic looking for deedennis can kindly fuck off.
> 
> i know we don't usually write fics like this in this fandom, but this story is very close to my heart and i wanted to share it with everyone.

“Hello, Mother.”

Dee stares down at the gravestone in front of her. After ten years, the carved letters are beginning to soften in the corners. The plot looks the same as it did five years ago, the last time she was here. The only time she’s been here since the burial.

“I didn’t bring you fucking flowers, so calm your tits,” she says as she lowers herself to sit cross-legged facing the stone. “And the wine is for me, I’m not giving you shit.”

Dee sets the glass on the ground and unscrews the cap from the bottle. She debated buying a more expensive bottle when she was at the store this morning, but she didn’t feel like wasting good wine on an occasion like this. Cheap stuff it is.

She pours a generous amount and lifts the glass as if to toast. “Here’s to you not being in my goddamn life anymore.”

The wine hits her throat sidewise and she’s forced to cough. She should have brought something stronger for this.

“You’re not the only one, though. Dennis left, too.” Dee leans back on one hand, pausing to gaze at the few stars visible in the city. “Finally took off. It’s been what, six months? I really don’t blame him for leaving, just weird why he did it. Never pictured him giving two shits about family.”

She takes a deep drink from her glass, letting the alcohol sting faintly on her tongue as it goes down. Blackberries.

“Like, really, of all the things that made him leave. Goddamn _family_? I always figured he’d be running away from it instead of towards it.” She licks a few drops from her top lip. “He’s still running from something, though.”

The fading city light shines through the dark liquid in her glass, turning it blood red. Dee turns it slowly in her hand, contemplating how different the cemetery looks through this curved lens.

“It’s definitely weird without him. We had to hire another bartender to replace him. She’s by far the most normal out of all of us, which is nice. Kind of reins us in when we need it. Although she’s way smarter than Dennis, her plans actually work out. Poor Dennis. Kid’s an idiot.”

Something tickles her hand, causing her to look down. A grasshopper is crawling over her fingers, just another obstacle to cross on its tiny day. Dee doesn’t move. The green creature pauses as it reaches her index, then suddenly jumps away.

“This is the great thing about you being dead, you know,” she says. The wine sloshes a little too vigorously as she uncrosses her legs under her to stretch them towards the headstone.

“I can finally say everything I’ve ever wanted to, and you can’t interrupt me.” She laughs and takes another sip. “You just have to lie there and take it. You can’t do a goddamn thing about it.”

Dee stares intently at the stone as she taps her sneakers together idly. It doesn’t move. She clears her throat.

“Uh, you know, I actually did come to see you once since you croaked. Dad had me convinced you’d faked your death and that you… whatever. The details don’t matter.” She blows on a loose strand of hair that had fallen in her face.

“Dennis was actually pretty hilarious to watch. I think he only came along to shake some emotions loose, or whatever. I have no clue what was up with him, but he was acting weird. Well, weirder than usual.” She pauses to drink again.

“Seeing your disgusting body definitely made him feel _something_, although I don’t think that’s what he’d be hoping for. He was a wreck for a week after that.”

A small weight closes gently around her heart.

“I always found it strange that I never felt anything towards you after you died. Dennis is always going on about how he doesn’t have emotions, but sometimes I wonder if it’s the other way around. Maybe I’m such a cold-hearted bitch I won’t ever…” She sighs as she trails off.

Dee snorts as she lifts the glass to her lips again. “Wouldn’t make me too different from you.”

She lets out a deep breath and places the empty glass on the ground next to her. Her own weight carries her down until she leans all the way back to stare up at the sky. Dusk is settling over the city like a blanket trying to muffle everything underneath it. Maybe that’s what the night is, here. Someone desperately tying to choke them all out in a futile attempt to get everyone below to finally shut up. Whatever. Philadelphians are too stubborn to let themselves go down like that.

“You know I ran into Amanda a few years ago,” she says, as if making casual conversation. “Yeah, she’s married now. I saw her at the grocery store with her wife. Obviously, I didn’t go talk to her. That would’ve been fucking awkward.”

Dee pulls handfuls out of grass from the ground beside her. It’s starting to get a little cold. September isn’t holding onto the summer heat as well as it used to, this late in the month.

“Sometimes, I—” She throws her head back against the grass. “I don’t even know. Sometimes I wonder if it would’ve worked out between us. If you hadn’t fucked me up so badly back then. Maybe I would’ve had the guts to actually make her stay.” She rips a handful of weeds to shreds. “Or to not lose her in the first place.”

One glass of wine shouldn’t be making her feel this dizzy. Maybe the four shots of whiskey she took before leaving the bar have something to do with that.

Maybe it’s something else.

Dee closes her eyes and inhales deeply. The cemetery just smells like dirt and must. Probably a good thing the bodies are so far underground.

“I never wanted to make her leave. But I remember feeling so goddamn ashamed every second I spent with her. Thanks to you…” she says as she pushes herself up onto her elbows to stare the stone again.

Her eyes silently follow the letters carved into the small monument to her mother’s life. The only proof her mother had ever existed as a person on this Earth. Although, one might argue the wake of destruction Dee left everywhere she went could serve that purpose just as well.

“I was in high school, for Christ’s sake,” she lets out, falling backwards again. “First loves are supposed to be a good thing, not something you can dig your talons into and just…”

“I don’t think Amanda understood that I didn’t hate her.” Dee laughs sharply. “Probably pretty hard to do that when I straight up told her I never wanted to see her again.”

Her gaze falls to her shoes. She feels a long-forgotten heat crawling up her face.

“Didn’t want to admit I really hated myself.”

Dee didn’t exactly relate to the Biblical heroes she heard about when she studied at Notre Dame, St. Joe’s sister school. They were always being called to do wonderful things for God, like give birth to Jesus or go on lifelong quests around the known world. It was hard to feel called to do anything wonderful when she was called the Aluminum Monster everywhere she went.

But Atlas: cursed by the gods to spend eternity holding up the sky. He had no choice but to stay there and suffer. If he tried to rebel against the powers that had constrained him there, he would be crushed under the weight of his own betrayal. All he could do was stay there and take it, relentless and worn down from millennia of carrying this burden. She couldn’t escape her life; even now, after all this time.

“You know she wasn’t the only one? There were other girls, women, after that.” Dee spreads her arms out as far as they go, feeling the moisture from the ground seep up into her clothes. “She was the first girl I loved, though, not that it lasted very long. You made damn sure of that. I never even got the chance to say the fucking words…”

She feels an unfamiliar stinging sensation behind her eyes.

“You probably realized what happened with Rebecca in college.” A knot begins forming in her throat. “There’s a lot I don’t remember from that day. Dennis told me some of it when he came to visit me, after. I don’t even know what made me do it in the first place. We could almost have had something real—I could have made something real. And instead, I burned everything to the ground.”

Dee closes her eyes and tries to picture the face that made her fall in love a second time. All she can see is smoke and the red and blue lights of the ambulance. She opens her eyes again to dispel the memory.

She tries to speak around the swelling knot.

“You didn’t even try to…”

Dee raises her chin to look at her mother’s name. It stares back silently. She stays awhile, then lifts herself back so she’s sitting on her legs. Noticing the wine bottle again, she quietly pours herself another glass.

“I get why you had me sent away. I was a ‘menace to society and to myself’, or whatever the hell you want to call it.”

She takes another long drink, keeping her gaze fixed on the stone. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, feeling the cold of the night begin to chill her bones.

“But you didn’t even visit? You lock up your own daughter and then just forget about her? That’s fucking cruel.”

A few crows take flight from a nearby plot, causing Dee to turn her gaze to her surroundings. There’s no one else here, which isn’t surprising for this time of day. Or night, rather. Just a bunch of lonely corpses people shoved together so they could forget about them while they continued to live their lives. She laughs at the irony of the situation.

“And now, I get to forget about you! I get to live my life with the comforting knowledge that you can’t fuck me up any worse than I already am now.”

The knot from her throat settles as a weight in the pit of her stomach.

“But yeah, Amanda.” Dee finishes the wine and sets the glass down next to her.

“I kept trying to think of an excuse to go say hi. Maybe prove to her that I wasn’t that same fucked-up mess she dated in high school. That somehow, I’d succeeded; I’d had relationships of my own, I’d done something with my life, I had great friends, a career that made me feel good about myself.”

“And you know what, _Mother_?” she spits. “I couldn’t think of a single goddamn way my life was better than when I was in high school. I’m an alcoholic, underpaid waitress at a shitty bar my brother owns with his shithead friends, I’ve never had a relationship last more than a week, the only friend I’ve had in the past ten years prefers to spend her time having sex with my goddamn stepdad, and I fucking hate myself!”

Deep inside, Dee feels the ceiling cracking. Her fingers are splayed out uselessly above her head, desperately trying to keep the impossible weight from caving in. It’s the same weight that’s always been there, for as long as she can remember. It’s gotten heavier with time and the cracks spidering its surface have become dangerously deep.

“So well done, Mom! You told me for so long how much of a monster I was that I finally became one!” She’s leaning forward as she screams, anchoring her fists into the earth above her mother’s body. “A heartless, independent monster who isn’t ruled by your lies anymore. And if that makes me a bad person, I guess I’ll just have to live with myself.”

She falls back on her heels. Her eyes feel raw. She looks around aimlessly, pouring more wine just to hold onto something as her hands tremble.

“It’s been nice, these past ten years,” Dee remarks. “I don’t have to worry about seeing you anymore or hearing your voice.” She pauses. “Haven’t been able to escape you completely, though.”

She stares into the deep colour held in her grip, noticing how it pulls away from the edges of the glass as it swirls lazily around the bottom.

“Working at a bar is great, sometimes. Like on Mother’s Day. Or your birthday. Helps me forget you ever existed.”

The bottle is half empty. Dee’s barely drunk even after a long day of drinking at the bar, although that shouldn’t be surprising for a woman boasting twenty-five years of heavy alcohol abuse.

“I mean, I try. That’s where the booze comes in.” She wags her finger at the stone. “You make it so goddamn difficult, sometimes.”

The glass is drained in one last mouthful. Dee sets it next to the bottle and brings her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around herself. The small breeze that’s been blowing all day was warmer this afternoon than it is now, not that there’s much inside her that the wind can move. Maybe she understands why Dennis thought to come here when he wanted to loosen some emotions.

“I’ve been realizing that I’m becoming like you,” she states after a few minutes of silence. “Or maybe I’ve always been like you. Some kind of sick joke.”

Dee squints at her mother’s name on the grave. The Reynolds last name that cursed her existence right from the start.

“Maybe this is the beginning of Dennis and I turning out like you and Aunt Donna,” she wonders. “Why did you even hate her so much? Was it because she abandoned you? Do you even know what you did to make her leave?” She takes in a shaky breath. “Was it all because of me?”

The stone says nothing back.

Dee sighs and rests her chin on her knees. The cold is making every nerve in her body tense beyond its breaking point. At any point, she could shatter like an ice sculpture.

She feels small within her own body.

“It’s not like I _wanted_ to push people away,” she tries to explain. “They just become so fucking unbearable to be around. ‘Oh, look at me! Asking for attention all the goddamn time! I’m so much more in touch with my feelings than you are! Why can’t you tell me you love me?’ Get a fucking grip.”

A beautiful face framed with black curls dances at the forefront of her mind for a moment and vanishes. The smile she’ll never see leaves her once again.

“Don’t need any of that for sex, though,” she says flippantly. “Sex with men was never meant to be paired with feelings. That never works out. Can’t even begin to count how many useless sacks of shit have fallen in love with me after I let them think they made me come.”

Maybe a bit of an exaggeration. Whatever; as if her audience could call her out on it.

“You always knew what sex is actually useful for. Not for actually getting off, good grief,” Dee scoffs. “These stupid assholes can’t even see past your vag to the money you’re blindly stealing from them. And that’s really all it’s good for: money, sometimes power. Not that kind of power; just, like, making the men around you feel like shit because you’re slamming ass all over town and they haven’t seen anything other than their own dicks in months.”

She raises her empty glass. “And if I can make them feel like I do for even just one goddamn second, then maybe I’m doing something right.”

It doesn’t make her feel good to say that out loud, but when was the last time she ever felt good about any of her choices?

“And you’ve slept with your heavy share of men throughout the years. Christ, you even slept with Mac!” Dee feels her face twisting into a grimace as she desperately tries to block out the mental image.

“Yeah, it turns out he’s gay now. Or, he was always gay, I guess. He was probably trying to fulfill his lifelong wish of fucking Dennis, actually. Pretty weird way to go about it.”

Her brother’s face drifts by lazily in her mind. Twins. Supposedly connected by an invisible, unbreakable bond. Maybe it wasn’t permanent, after all.

“Goddamn Dennis, thinking he can raise a kid he won’t instantly fuck up.” Dee carelessly pours another glass of wine. Last one.

“He has absolutely no idea how a family works. Not a good one, in any case. I give him two more weeks until he comes crawling back with his tail between his legs.”

Six months.

He’s been gone for six months.

Six months since she’s even heard his voice.

_I can’t do any of this shit anymore. Yeah, I’m—I’m leaving. I’m gonna go be a dad._

Six months since she started being overwhelmed by the constant state of disorientation and loss she’s burdened with every day.

Blowing up someone’s car only does so much for the soul.

“And now he’s just _gone_,” she chokes. “I didn’t picture I’d be flying out to visit him on weekends or anything, but you’d think he’d maybe _text_ us sometime? Is that too much to ask? Some woman calls and says he knocked her up, and it’s suddenly more important than the people who’ve been with him since the beginning?”

The unfamiliar prickling behind the eyes is back.

“Who doesn’t even give his phone number to his goddamn _sister_? I get the others. Charlie can’t text anyway, Mac would be bothering him literally all the time, and Frank was a shit role model for parenting. But his _sister_?”

There’s a dull pain in her hands she can’t quite place.

“We’re the ones who lived through everything together. He can’t just— We survived all the horrible shit that happened to us at school, the stuff no one else knew about or even cared to ask about!”

Dee can’t let herself think about any of that. _Not now not now not—_

“We were the only ones who could understand! And it didn’t always stay that way, especially the past few years. But no one else had to live through having Frank as a father, never mind _you_ as a mother.”

She’s always known her burden is impossible to bear alone. The heavy stone ceiling pressing down on her shoulders, pushing her bones to a breaking point.

Some nights, Dee could feel the shifting weight of the footsteps walking on the ceiling of her world. She could make out Frank’s heavy shuffle, the sharp clicks of Barbara’s heels, the footfalls of the teachers and students who made her life a waking nightmare.

She knows that Dennis is somewhere out there holding up his world too. He hasn’t always been the Golden God, the self-proclaimed being devoid of feelings that looks down on the mortals around them. He hasn’t even always been the man plagued by such insecurity that he lashes out at those who try to love him most.

Dee remembers how he used to be: her twin brother who was there to push up against the weight crushing them both with the little force he had. The same shared burden, their pain overlapping as the footsteps resounded above them. There was still the risk of being crushed, but the comforting presence of her other half was enough to give her strength one day at a time.

But she’s always known her burden is impossible to bear alone.

The pain in her hands brings her back down into her body. She slowly opens her palms, revealing the deep crescent-shaped indents left by her nails.

The stone in front of her doesn’t give a shit about her pain.

“And now it’s done. I don’t have to worry about you calling me anymore to berate me or coming over just to shit all over my apartment. I outlived you, bitch.” Dee laughs, letting her fingers dig deep into the grass next to her thigh. “I can jam it into your stupid, ugly, decaying face.”

Her fingers still in the grass.

“You probably don’t even have a face anymore,” she muses. “Last time we were here, it was looking pretty rough. I didn’t get to steal any of your money, but at least I got to see that you’re a fucking ugly corpse.”

Dee casts a glance down at the glass in her hand. Tiny ripples bounce off the edges, sending the dark liquid into murky chaos. She tries in vain to still her hand. The shaking doesn’t stop.

“You know, for all the work you did trying to look young and beautiful your whole life, it’s so satisfying seeing you like this.” The wine continues to gently climb up the sides of the glass. “Karma’s a bitch, Mother. Horrible people don’t turn out beautiful.”

Another crack in the ceiling. Another pinch at her heart.

“Even right down to the very end,” Dee continues. “Dying of a botched neck lift. How presumptive. And now it doesn’t even matter what you looked like, because it’s all gone. You spent so much money t-t-to _preserve_ your beauty. Th-the fake tans, the hair dye, the expensive jewellery… all that shit. All this effort to keep your skin radiant, and now you don’t even have any goddamn skin!”

She laughs drily. “It almost makes me jealous, you know?” Dee contemplates her glass and takes a lengthy sip. Still the fucking blackberries.

“Cause you’re dead, so you don’t have to live with yourself anymore. No more of this constant yelling from the entire goddamn world that you look old and gross. That you’re this ugly, fat, unfuckable flesh sack walking around on two feet until the ground swallows you up in fifty or sixty years. Less than that if I’m lucky,” she says, raising another toast to the silent stone.

There’s a hollowness within her that grows with every word. It doesn’t feel good to admit out loud that it would be easier to be dead than to keep on living like this. Easier to exist in a void rather than suffer at the hands of unceasing loneliness and crushing insecurity for years and years. The incalculable addictions can’t do enough to keep it all away. It’s never enough.

There’s an unfamiliar stinging behind her eyes that has returned.

“Sometimes I wish you weren’t gone.” Dee gives a shaky sigh.

“Sometimes I wish you were still here so you could look at me—really _look_ at me—and see what you created.” She feels a sharp pain returning in her palm. “All I heard, my whole life, was your voice—your _fucking voice_. Degrading me, insulting me, interrupting me, cutting me down and ignoring me. You left me to rot in my own mind.”

She chokes on a sob. “An-and I _never_ got to… You never let me say anything t-to defend myself! I was so goddamn scared of you and so fucking _pissed_ at you all the time and I nev—I could never even fucking _tell you_!”

Dee feels the salt marking her cheeks as it bites its way down her face.

“So here I am! I’m finally here to tell you how much of a horrible _bitch mother_ you were to me! Took forty years to figure out how to get the words out and it’s too late anyway. You’ll never see my face so I can _show you_ how much you fucked me up. H-how much y-you manipulated me and _broke_ me until I was exactly how you saw me!”

She can feel her pulse pounding in her ears, beating in time with the tears streaming from her eyes.

“And it’s fucking too late, so now the only way to get closure is to talk to a fucking rock!”

Inside, the cracks in her ceiling finally connect. She watches helpless as a piece of stone breaks away, falling and falling until it shatters on the ground far below. The figure inside her lets out a scream. She can’t tell if it’s for pain or for victory, but maybe the emptiness within her feels a little smaller.

Dee’s shoulders shake. She fights to get the words out. “Even here, being digested by maggots, you still control so much of my life. I am always going to be a disappointment to you.” She waves her hand fruitlessly. “I’m a disappointment to everyone and I don’t even care what they think. I care too much, not enough, what the fuck does it matter?”

She looks into the depths of the wine left in her grasp. Her fingers are still shaking.

“I know I’m never going to be good enough for you,” she says, trying to steady her voice. “I’m never going to make you proud, but for some irrational reason I keep trying.”

Her teeth clench. “Maybe I just want to be loved.”

Through the gap in the ceiling, a light begins to shine. It casts shadows throughout the entire void, but Dee can finally make out the broken shapes of what’s left of her. Memories of love mangled by her mother’s face.

Maybe this isn’t worth protecting after all.

Maybe it would be better to let go.

A new face flashes before her eyes. Long dark hair, warm eyes, a smile as devious as it is bright.

“I met someone, Mom,” says Dee as she takes a deep breath. “And before you ask, yes she’s a woman. That’s still going on. She’s the new bartender we hired last month. Her name is Cindy and she makes me feel in a way that I haven’t in as long as I can remember.”

Her eyes follow the letters inscribed on the stone again. She snorts and pushes off the cold ground to stand before her mother.

“I won’t let you fuck this one up,” she says. “I don’t give a shit about you anymore.”

Dee dries her eyes with her sleeve. Glancing down, she notices the wine still in her grip.

Shards of glass explode against the grave. The deep red liquid drips into the numbers carved in the rock.

Dee feels the satisfaction bloom in her heart. Her eyes narrow as she reads the words again and she laughs as she walks away from her mother for the last time.

“What a bunch of bullshit. No one ever loved you.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! comments are very appreciated. this is definitely the writing project that took the most out of me in 2019 and i hope you've enjoyed it.


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